Netflix's Unbelievable Offers Relief in the Era of Troubled Cops

There are many reasons why Netflix's Unbelievable is the streaming program you should be watching right now, and with eight episodes (most coming in under 50 minutes), it's a series you could easily take down in a weekend with room to spare. That's not to say it's easy to watch. For those not already in the know, the series tell the true story of two detectives investigating a series of rapes, while at the same time — and unbeknownst to them — a survivor of that same rapist undergoes a hellish ordeal when the police don't believe her account of the crime. The first episode in particular, which introduces Kaitlyn Dever in a stunning performance as rape survivor Marie, will be triggering to many, and even for those without sexual assault experiences it's a lot to go through. But as the series unfolds, the cop drama that brings together detectives Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) and Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette) becomes some of the most refreshingly different and compulsively watchable television this year.

What's particularly thrilling about the Duvall/Rasmussen partnership is how it stands in such stark contrast to the recent traditions of the detective drama. True-crime fiction has been an integral building block of the streaming age of television, and it's not hard to see why. Tracking the investigation of a crime over the course of a season (or more) is a surefire way to ensure audiences stay hoked on a series. Whether docu-series or drama, the last few years have been full of these kinds of shows. On the drama side, series like Broadchurch and The Fall set the tone, with their eccentric detectives whose personal lives are disasters, and even Sherlock got a self-destructive makeover. NBC's Hannibal turned its lead investigator into a profiler so empathetic that by the end of three seasons, he was almost certainly about to join Hannibal Lecter on a murderous rampage. Most recently, Mindhunter decided to cut out the middleman and make the entire focus of the show the intersection between the brains of serial killers and the psyches of the detectives profiling them. And then of course there is the all-time apex of TV detectives being tortured and undone by the seedy worlds they investigate: HBO's True Detective.

Taken individually, each of these shows have their own artistic merit. Some of them are even Great TV. But collectively, the trend has become positively suffocating. Which is why, despite its unsettling first episode and pervasive content about sexual assault, Unbelievable is such an invigorating shock to the system. Playing colleagues thrown together by chance, Wever and Collette have fantastic chemistry, but there's a distinct lack of heaviness in the script that allows them to traverse these dark paths yet remain recognizably human. Neither woman has the kind of dark side we've become so used to in our TV detectives. Neither is concealing a drug habit, a violent upbringing or any kind of deep-seated trauma that will inevitably lead to a bombastic meltdown in the penultimate episode. From our first scene with Karen Duvall, as she interrogates a rape victim played by Danielle MacDonald (Patti Cake$), the character draws the audience in with a kind of preternatural compassion reminiscent of the late-stage, competent Zoey she played on Nurse Jackie. Collette, meanwhile, has shown she is adept at so many different styles and genres over the course of her career that it comes as no surprise when she's introduced as a dogged investigator and take-no-shit cop, though crucially, that hard edge is grounded in her first scene while interrogating a man who turns out to merely be a night-strolling environmentalist. Stubborn as all hell, Rasmussen asks the indignant witness to imagine a loved one as a victim of sexual assault and how dogged he'd want the investigators to be. Suddenly, Rasmussen isn't the loose cannon that a lesser script would write her as, just a professional with finely honed empathic instincts.

Unbelievable deftly explores the way these two women build a partnership, warily testing each other's dedication to the case, carefully merging their respective teams together, feeling out each other's styles. Collette's Rasmussen is the more hard-boiled of the two, while Wever's Duvall is younger and more given to enthusiasm. But neither of these traits lead them to become one-dimensional caricatures. They both turn out to be good at empathizing with victims, although neither proves to be especially cuddly with their underlings. They are, in short, well-rounded, complicated, and thus thrillingly alive. 

The Duvall/Rasmussen dynamic is more than just refreshing. It's vitally necessary as a counterbalance to Marie's side of the series. Were our two detectives spiraling down self-destructive paths  — searching the back woods for Carcosa or whatnot — the half of the show where Kaitlyn Dever's life is being systematically picked apart by a society that refuses to believe her would be completely undermined. Our detectives' investigation has to feel realistic in order for the devastation of Marie's storyline to feel the same.

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Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.